Lazarus Trubman is a college professor and has taught the Theory of Literature and Roman languages for twenty-four years. Poetry has been published by The Threepenny Review, Exposition Review, Vestal Review, The New Reader, Cordite Poetry Review, The Sea Letter and others.

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AFTER A SEVEN-YEAR-OLD WAR

In the street in front of a hotel
two children are playing;
a boy of five, rachitic,
and a girl with a toy pistol:
they are playing on a serious note,
and the little boy,
rather petulant and unwilling,
is told to stand up
against the piss-stained wall;
he can’t understand that he is then
supposed to fall down;
the girl shows him how –
with all the experience
of her seven years…

D. R. James has taught college writing, literature, and peace-making for 36 years and lives in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His most recent of nine collections are Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2020), Surreal Expulsion (The Poetry Box, 2019), and If god were gentle (Dos Madres Press, 2017), and his micro-chapbook All Her Jazz is free, fun, and printable-for-folding at the Origami Poems Project. https://www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage

..

Assisted Living

My father had entered a realm
I would never know. Although
slumped in a chair
in that common room
at the end of a dimly lit corridor—
well beyond the other withered bodies,
their wheel chairs lining
the bumpered walls, their
attendants glib, shouting directives—
my father sat small
like a seer, his web-thin hair
roostered, whiskers grizzling
his business chin. He was decoding
some constellation located vaguely
above the bulletin board announcing
Thursday Bingo, muttering,
raising his wasted arms as if in warning
the world was about to end.

Which it was—and it shuddered
shock waves through my throat,
the distance between us
collapsing like a telescope.
My mother, seated as calmly
as if my life would go on,
looked at me as if I were signaling
it wouldn’t, and before he would die
two days later, my father narrated ancient
sales trips—Gary, Terre Haute, Fort Wayne—
then turned only to my wife and ended,
“What do you think about all this?”

When I was a teen he seemed mainly to care
about the length of my hair, and in all
wrote me two letters, both advising
about life insurance. But now
my speech shivered, my chest
compressed the universe
of my heart, and I didn’t know
what to do with my hands.

—first published in If god were gentle (Dos Madres Press, 2017)

..

First Light

After the year of mere staring,
various grays at last color
tree, beach, breaker, the dark

T.M. Semrad is a poet and writer. Her writing has appeared in Entropy, Nightingale & Sparrow, Pomme Journal and the Black Clock blog. She has an M.F.A. in Writing from the California Institute of the Arts and was a recipient of a UCLA Writing Project Fellowship.

*

~~~

My birth month May’s magic – Jacarandas
color the air lavender. Corolla
carpet streets and sidewalks so that the world
softens. Still tires and soles
crush petals into an oily smudge.
The world buried beneath a fairy haze
exudes a rank perfume.

Absent AffirmationA selfie, my mother’s doppelganger, deleted

~~~

I celebrate father, hold up
his present, my face an aching grin
to give him a gift who gifted me. Later,
when I am grown,
he and I will walk together
alone, rehearsing for this future
on a dirt road between two irrigation ditches,
our two shadows stretched, his to the horizon
always pulling beyond my own.

Three Father’s DaysPhotographs, without my mother, one print, two digital

~~~

The moment will have
happened behind houses and
trees without my knowing –
she pulls
back from her ledge – the moment
when the dark lightens – she
tugs the rope
free – so
what I thought black wasn’t
so. Which is the same thing. The light changes
the dark. It emerges, a hummingbird
wet from its egg.

Dark LightensA polaroid of my daughter

~~~

A space exists between molecules of chair
and molecules of floor, imperceptible
separation. I examine the dark line between
wood slats and each wooden support where
I cannot fit my fingers.

Only, the floor attracts the chair by unseen
force, so that nothing seems to float. All
appears at rest, this house within the earth
that cradles me – you, the gravity that holds
me in place.

Still, a path, an interval persists between
baseboard and slat, viewed through columns
of legs, between house and earth, between
you and me. So I float. My hand glides across
this page and air stirs beneath the chair. You
that hold me, you give me the ability to rise.

James Thurgood was born in Nova Scotia, grew up in Windsor, Ontario, and now lives in Calgary, Alberta. He has been a general labourer, musician, and teacher – not necessarily in that order. His poems have appeared in various journals, anthologies, and in a collection (Icemen/Stoneghosts, Penumbra Press).

//

Chinatown

we rose from bed
opened the curtains:
the old Chinese ladies
seven or eight
on the sidewalk
at one edge of the small lawn
– hands clasped at backs,
in dull peasant garb
chirping and twittering
like all the birds of morning

we washed, dressed –
downstairs, put on a record
sliced strawberries and peaches
to eat in yogurt
which was new

kissed again
with fresh ripe mouths

stepped out the door
to a city full of summer

the old Chinese ladies
had gained the further edge
of the lawn –
we laughed
thinking them slow
and silly

Emma Alexandrov is a student and a writer currently rooted in Atlanta, GA, Portland, OR, and Poughkeepsie, NY. She edits Windows Facing Windows Review.

~

Labyrinth Project

Sharp of being, you are embroidering my heart in the hollows
of our silences. We are tracing paths: by night, you take me
in your hands, a fish arcing muscular in capture.

Then, moored on a table, my core loosens in a dish of light,
whistling as it’s flooded and emptied of air. As you watch it
from across the room, threading the needle, it bristles to unfold.

It’s in the stitches that cell slush means body and
carbon whirrings mean soul, I know, but my throat can only
splutter at the spoiled water dripping from our thread because I know

I must be placed, unbalanced, back into the grey
with your golden line binding shut the new window in my side,
with my jagged path ripping the placid surface of the sea.

~

Sea-Dream of the Substance of Another

Floating: the ocean makes in itself a space for me
to drift as a pebble embedded in mirror.
Giving nothing, taking nothing,
this dream binds impenetrably the horizon:
water smoother than a glass’s surface,
sharper than its edge.

Yet, a rival illusion takes root
in one of my mind’s simpler chambers.
You are a sheet of shade
wavering on careful legs in the dark
like a tree arrived recently to the shore.
Your shadow flows toward the water’s hilly field
and sends a song across it,
running on a city of delicate feet
that stitch ripples into the blue.
Your notes carve nests in my skin,
and, in still wholeness, hold light, spark –

Clara Burghelea’s The Flavor of the Other is both a progressive exit and an appearing act. Inside of each, stillness awaits no inheritance. Full of confessional reserve and prayers that maybe begin with amen, these poems carry the exaggerated possessions of location as the divided theft of void and oblivion. Burghelea knows taste as a portal through which one can swap hungers, and makes of self an otherness versed in the familiarities of a becoming not saddled with being. If it is here that migration and exile are two birdwatchers marked by the same talon, then a reader may place themselves as one combed by any scar that holds hair as the body’s longest fire while another counts backward then forward using absence as census.